Loschert Lecture: Church and World: Reflections from the Disjunctions Project

Loschert Lecture: Church and World: Reflections from the Disjunctions Project

The next in our series of
Loschert Lectures will be delivered by Charles Margrave Taylor on Tuesday 2nd December.

In this talk, Charles Taylor will reflect on a project known as the “Disjunctions Project” that he has helped to initiate which seeks to understand how the Catholic Church can better enter into dialogue with the modern world. Recent scandals in the Catholic Church have undoubtedly undermined the credibility of the Church to speak with authority in an “age of authenticity”. This project attempts to consider ways in which the credibility of the Christian message may be recovered in our contemporary secular age.

Charles Margrave Taylor, CC GOQ FRSC (born November 5, 1931) is a Canadian philosopher from Montreal, Quebec best known for his contributions to political philosophy, the philosophy of social science, history of philosophy and intellectual history. This work has earned him the prestigious Kyoto Prize and the Templeton Prize, in addition to widespread esteem among philosophers. In 2007, Taylor served with Gérard Bouchard on the Bouchard-Taylor Commission on Reasonable Accommodation with regard to cultural differences in the province of Quebec. He is a practising Roman Catholic.

Taylor began his undergraduate education at McGill University (B.A. in History in 1952). He continued his studies at the University of Oxford, first as a Rhodes Scholar at Balliol College (B.A. in Philosophy, Politics and Economics) in 1955, and then as a post-graduate (D.Phil. in 1961), under the supervision of Isaiah Berlin and G. E. M. Anscombe.

He succeeded John Plamenatz as Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at the University of Oxford and became a Fellow of All Souls College. For many years, both before and after Oxford, he was Professor of Political Science and Philosophy at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, where he is now professor emeritus. Taylor was also a Board of Trustees Professor of Law and Philosophy at Northwestern University in Evanston for several years after his retirement from McGill.

Taylor was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1986. In 1991, Taylor was appointed to the Conseil de la langue française in the province of Quebec, at which point he critiqued Quebec's commercial sign laws. In 1995, he was made a Companion of the Order of Canada. In 2000, he was made a Grand Officer of the National Order of Quebec. He was awarded the 2007 Templeton Prize for progress towards research or discoveries about spiritual realities, which includes a cash award of US$1.5 million. In 2007 he and Gérard Bouchard were appointed to head a one-year Commission of Inquiry into what would constitute "reasonable accommodation" for minority cultures in his home province of Quebec, Canada.[4] In June 2008 he was awarded the Kyoto Prize in the arts and philosophy category. The Kyoto Prize is sometimes referred to as the Japanese Nobel.

Selected Bibliography

1964. The Explanation of Behaviour. Routlededge Kegan Paul.1975.
Hegel. Cambridge University Press.
1979. Hegel and Modern Society. Cambridge University Press.
1985. Philosophical Papers (2 volumes).
1989. Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity. Harvard University Press
1992. The Malaise of Modernity, being the published version of Taylor's Massey Lectures. Reprinted in the U.S. as The Ethics of Authenticity. Harvard University Press
1993. Reconciling the Solitudes: Essays on Canadian Federalism and Nationalism. McGill-Queen's University Press
1994. Multiculturalism: Examining The Politics of Recognition.
1995. Philosophical Arguments. Harvard University Press
1999. A Catholic Modernity? Oxford University Press.
2002. Varieties of Religion Today: William James Revisited. Harvard University Press
2004. Modern Social Imaginaries. Duke University Press.
2007. A Secular Age. Harvard University Press
2011. Dilemmas and Connections: Selected Essays. Harvard University Press.
Forthcoming. With Hubert Dreyfus, Retrieving Realism.